Walking with gorillas and Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, Uganda's first wildlife veterinarian

This episode of The PrimateCast: Origins is taken from CICASP's International Primatology Lecture Series: Past, Present and Future Perspectives of the Field.

The IPLS is dedicated to providing origin stories told by experienced researchers in primatology and related fields. The lectures are conducted via Zoom within our CICASP Seminar in Science Communication for graduate students of our program at Kyoto University. We are releasing the audio from these lectures right here on The PrimateCast: Origins.

For anyone interested in viewing the video versions of these lectures, head over to the CICASP TV YouTube channel, where you can also watch them live as we stream our Zoom feeds there.

For the 20th international primatology lecture, we invited Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka to join us and speak about her own origins, as a primatologist and wildlife veterinarian, the first in Uganda, and the story behind Conservation through Public Health (CPTH) and Gorilla Conservation Coffee.

The conversation was recorded on Wednesday, April 5, 2023.

In the talk, Dr. Gladys moves from describing the events in her childhood that foreshadowed her career as a conservationist and wildlife veterinarian through the development of her career and efforts to conserve the endangered mountain gorillas of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Uganda, largely by supporting the health of people living in the area. 

Topics covered include:

• her new memoir, Walking with Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet (pick up a copy!)
• being a wildlife vet for endangered gorillas and when to intervene
• ecotourism for conservation
• why health and economic stability is key to successful conservation of species
• building the African Primatological Society to support African efforts for research and conservation of African primates

Dr. Gladys also recounts how devastating the COVID-19 pandemic was ecotourism in the region, and how she and others mobilized to ensure that the local community was vaccinated and had access to personal protective equipment such as masks and  medical support so that the risk of transmission to the gorillas was minimized. 

I found these stories incredibly inspiring, and endlessly insightful. Dr. Gladys’ passion for people and nature comes out in spades, and her model for conservation is one I’d love to see adopted all over the world as it has found a way to succeed through compa